ORTF - Open-Source Reconfigurable Testing Framework for SDN Switches.

Driven by the programmable features of software defined networking (SDN), both academia and industry pay great attention to the design of SDN switch prototypes. As a result, there is an increasing need for tools and techniques to test such prototypes in terms of protocol correctness and performance. Unfortunately, existing tools whether lack the flexibility to support novel southbound protocol tests, or don't provide accurate and synchronized timestamps between control and data path. This paper presents ORTF, a fully reconfigurable framework for testing SDN switch prototypes regarding protocol correctness and performance. ORTF takes the full advantage of CPU and FPGA co-design to provide flexible APIs for test case customization and accurate timestamps. Under the hood, it leverages an efficient scheduling algorithm to integrate control and data plane processing into one single pipeline. This fundamentally solved the problem of time synchronization. Our evaluation demonstrates that ORTF could cover a wide range of SDN test cases, while providing no-worse accuracy compared with commercial testers.